Stage right: Philly theater fest serves GOP fare

PHILADELPHIA — A festival opening this month in Philadelphia is giving new meaning to the phrase “political theater.”

Theater director and local playwright Cara Blouin, frustrated with what she saw as a liberal bias in the performing arts, enters stage right:

“I went to a play ... that was a satire of the right, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘This isn’t funny’ and I couldn’t figure out why it was boring,” she said. “Then I realized nothing was surprising me, I’d heard all these arguments and jokes so many times.”

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With that, the Republican Theater Festival was born.

Blouin sent out a call to the theater community in July for submissions of plays “that represent ideas related to social or fiscal conservatism, issues considered part of the Republican Party, Libertarian or Tea Party platforms or concerns of people of faith.” Nothing deemed to have “the ultimate aim of criticizing or satirizing conservative ideas” would be considered.

The idea was met with consternation by many members of the theater community both locally and beyond. The critic Roger Ebert, tongue firmly in cheek, tweeted, “At last! A theater festival with right-wing plays.”

More than a hundred plays were submitted, with 10 chosen (two are one-act plays, eight are 10-minute plays) for the three-day festival. They take aim at many of the right’s biggest bugaboos: Occupy Wall Street, labor unions, abortion and the “war on religion.” The submissions were overwhelmingly about fiscal conservatism, Blouin said, with relatively few tackling social issues like gay marriage or affirmative action.

“Most have to do with feeling like an outsider,” said Blouin, 33, a registered independent from west Philadelphia. “Many are personal meditations on what it feels like when nobody appreciates your values.”

Some of the actors, writers and directors involved with the three-day festival, at Philadelphia’s historic Plays and Players theater from Nov. 12-14, said they’ve gotten some criticism for their involvement and some had their own soul-searching to do before jumping in.

“Folks near and dear to me passionately feel that giving a platform to so-called ‘conservative’ ideas is likely to turn our stages into an extension of Fox News,” said playwright Quinn Eli. The festival will stage his play “Running Amok,” in which a black athlete demands to take responsibility for his role in a sex scandal while his publicist wants to make race-based excuses for him.

He said the theater community should give itself — and its audience— more credit than that. Theatergoers, Eli said, will “know if something stinks in Denmark, and if they get shown a bunch of partisan claptrap, they’ll go running for the doors.”

“I’m a Democrat, I’m a Jew, I’m a feminist, I believe in marriage and work equality and I am doing the Republican Theater Festival,” actor Lesley Berkowitz said in a home video she made for the festival.

She decided to perform in the festival because “you find out where you stand on something by arguing about it, debating about it, thinking about it from the point of view of the person who opposes what you think.”

The director of Eli’s play, Chris Braak, said an ideal outcome would be if the festival created a platform for discussion. He questioned, however, whether liberal theatergoers will attend conservative plays and whether conservatives turned off by theater will suddenly show up because they agree with the subject matter.

“I would love to see the beginning of a general discourse on politics in the theater,” Braak said, “but my suspicion is that it’s not going to be very successful.”

Blouin, who raised funds for the festival online and not through any of the arts grants that small-government Republicans love to hate, said that starting fresh conversations in a realm that’s philosophically homogeneous can only benefit artists and their audiences.